Harry looked up, shivering a little as he felt the cold, sterile environment of the morgue get just a little bit colder.
The bathroom at the Factory was one of the filthiest in town, coming in second only to the bar on Spring Street.
The floors were a dark green tile and grew mold so fast that you could almost watch it, first starting in the gray hued cement that held one to the other around their edges, then slowly working its way in until the original colour was just an odd dot in the centre.
There was a space heater against the far wall that never worked, and would occasionally shoot radiant blue sparks at people walking by if there was enough water on the floor. It was a sickly nicotine yellow and always smelt like burning hair. If you looked inside the grate near its top, you could see bits of paper and beer stoppers that had been shoved inside by idle hands. Some were charred beyond recognition, others with simply singed along their edges. Once someone had found a hockey card lodged in there, wrapped in a plastic sleeve and in mint condition.
While there were no separate bathrooms for different genders, this had clearly been the boy’s bathroom. There was a urinal not far from the heater that always stank of warm piss. It was stained a dark orange around the sides and near the bottom where it met the pipe. There were still little blue cakes placed in it every day (likely tossed in from a safe distance of several feet), but it had gone largely unused for almost two years. Very few men had wanted to put their manhood anywhere near its corroded porcelain surface.
The girl’s room had been commandeered by the staff several years back, when they’d decided they no longer wanted to share a bathroom with their customers.
Sara let out a long, mournful wail as she stared at herself it the filthy mirror, trying to force herself to stop for the third time. More tears welled up and blocked her vision until she couldn’t even recognize herself, her soft features coming out like a picture taken while someone had spread Vaseline on the lens.
She let out another long, baleful moan that turned into an “oh” sound, glancing back at the bathroom door nervously to make sure it was locked.
There were white, milky stains around the edges of the mirror. Her gaze found them again and again, no matter how hard she tried to look away.
She dabbed at her eyes with the stocking wrapped around her hand, clearing her vision again. She sniffed back, trying to stop her face as it insisted on leaking from every available crevice. She wiped her nose, so hard that her rings scraped against its tip and made it red.
“Fuck,” she cursed, reaching down and retrieving her purse from her side and laying it on the edge of the sink. With trembling hands she worked the clasp, her vision becoming muddy and blurred again.
“Stop it!” she snapped at herself, finding her foundation and slamming it down on the sink.
She turned on the tap cautiously, only touching it with the tips of her fingers. It was just as dirty as everything else here was. There was a brown sticky substance on one end that had been there for months. The janitors avoided it as much as the patrons did.
The water that spouted from the tap was yellow at first, then slowly faded to a more normal shade. It never completely lost that hue, and gained something that again looked like diluted milk, but was serviceable.
She cupped her hands beneath and waited until they were full, then splashed it onto her face. It left a sour smell on her skin, but the cold was refreshing and brought her back to reality, at least for a moment.
When she looked at herself again the sparkling treads her tears had left were gone, but her nose was still red. The skin under her eyes was red too, and had become puffy and pronounced.
She huffed, unscrewing the top of her makeup and beginning to apply it methodically. In some odd way it soothed her, the way any familiar task soothed the weary. She’d been applying foundation in these same motions since she was eleven, and returning to it somehow brought her to a calm place. Not necessarily a place of peace, but a place where she could get lost in the routine of the mundane until the storm finally passed.
By the time she finished, she wasn’t even sniffling anymore.
She looked back down into her purse.
There was an orange prescription bottle there that until a few hours ago had resided in her mother’s medicine cabinet. It was filled with small blue pills with a diagonal indentation on the back. She watched it for a moment, as if expecting it to do something, then picked it up and popped the top off with her thumb.
She poured a handful of the little blue circles her mother called happy pills and her father called Valium into her hand, forming a neat little mountain in her palm. She looked at it again, wriggling her fingers and feeling the way they moved and shifted with her every motion, then poured them back into the bottle until there were only two left. Those two stared back at her like two
